'Occult & Psychical Sciences': The Tragicall Hiftory of Dr. John Dee, Part 1 of 2 🌙

Faustus dealt with devils. Dee believed that he interrogated angels. Playwright Christopher Marlowe may nonetheless have had Dee as one model in his mind.

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’Occult and Psychical Sciences’ is a DK group established by Angmar to appreciate and discuss all things spooky. The name of the group is based on a favorite book from Angmar’s youth. No claim is made of actual scientific rigor. Nor is any belief in the supernatural required. Please be polite — this isn’t the best place for general arguments about skepticism vs. speculation. Personal anecdotes are welcomed!

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I. The Consutant

August 1578.

The twentieth year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Envying the Spanish and Portuguese empires, English explorers and courtiers alike bubbled with schemes to expand the nation’s overseas reach. Captain (not yet Sir) Francis Drake, well-known raider of the Spanish Main, was away on a three-year voyage that would circle the globe. From Newfoundland, Martin Frobisher was on his way back to England, the ship’s belly packed with ore believed to be gold-bearing. 

In a dull provincial town called Stratford-Upon-Avon, a 14-year-old boy of absolutely no importance chafed with the restless energy of adolescence.

Dee. Wikipedia.

Fifty-one-year-old John Dee, Doctor of Philosophy, physician, linguist, geographer, genealogist, chemist, astronomer, astrologer, student of magic, mathematician, international traveler, archivist, librarian, legal scholar, and political consultant (not to mention ordained Catholic priest and recent bridegroom) kissed his young wife, swung astride his horse, and spurred away towards Norwich from his famous research center at Mortlake on the River Thames.

In Dee’s saddlebag reposed a manuscript on which he had labored for nearly a year. Mustering all the written records and intellectual power at his command, the scholar had concluded — contrary to all previous assumptions — that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth was by birth the rightful heiress of vast territories on the Continent and even across the Atlantic.

The neighborhood of Mortlake, some 200 years later. By Joseph Mallord William Turner. headforart.com/...

At this delicate moment in the dance of international politics, Dee’s thesis had suddenly assumed an urgent relevancy. A message yesterday had summoned him to the ancient city northeast of London, where the royal Court was temporarily in residence.

Drops began to spot Dee’s riding cloak. Rain fell, and went on falling, on a hundred miles of muddy roads. Dee pressed his horse ahead as fast as he dared.

But when he dismounted, stiff and sore, in the old walled city, no one cared about his research paper any more. Already fresh events on the Continent had usurped the royal attention. 

Norwich a couple of hundred years before Dee’s visit already possessed its landmark castle, cathedral and city walls. www.themurderers.co.uk/...

Yet Dee’s presence there at Norwich would prove fateful.

Elizabeth Tudor, now in her 45th year, still unmarried, childless, and without a designated heir, had been feeling unwell for some time. But the Queen was never one to shirk a duty, nor neglect the demands of power. 

She therefore was traveling on her usual summer Progress through a portion of the realm. Elaborate, symbol-packed, and ceremonious, these tours allowed the monarch to observe local conditions, shine before her people, and receive their personal homage. She and her courtiers lodged in some of the nation’s most splendid households — sparing Her Majesty’s treasury while spending-down the wealth of rich potential troublemakers.

While the Court rested at Norwich, awaiting Dee, bad news from London disconcerted the royal entourage.

Authorities in the City had just unearthed — from a manure pile — three small human figures formed from wax, dressed, and pierced all over with pigs’ bistles.

Two figures were of men. Some thought their outfits looked like those royal councillors. The female figure bore a written label: “Elizabeth.”

The London authorities dispatched the waxen images to Norwich. The ugly  things arrived there just ahead of Dee. 

Elizabeth had known Dee for many years.

When Elizabeth’s sister Mary was still on the throne, and Elizabeth lived in constant danger from Mary’s paranoia, Dee had secretly visited Elizabeth in her rural place of exile, to predict her future.

In so doing, Dee had risked his own life. He was picked up by the authorities on suspicion of treason, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and threatened with torture, perhaps tortured in fact. 

His inquisitors hoped Dee would implicate others close to Elizabeth in illegal activities and so help build a case for treason against Elizabeth herself.

They failed, however. Mary’s own Privy Council acquitted Dee. 

As Queen, Elizabeth remembered.

When Dee published a mystico-philosophico-political tract called Monas Hieroglyphica that caused some muttering about improper use of magic, the Queen protected Dee, invited him to meet with her, and read part of the book herself.

Dee’s personal motif, the “Monas,” on which he centered his controversial and coded book, looked simple but was dense with hidden meanings. Wikipedia.

When a comet appeared, Elizabeth again summoned Dee. He was able to assure her that it portended nothing harmful to her or the nation.

So who better to consult about the wax figures than Dr. Dee, coincidentally just arrived in Norwich?

Of all those in her entourage only the Queen’s secretary, Thomas Wilson, had the nerve to be present when Dee examined the repellent objects.

We do not know Dee’s procedure. According to his own notes, he performed some sort of “godly and artificial” magic. Logically he would have sought to verify the meaning of the images, learn who was responsible, and counteract their baleful influence.

A few days later Dee was dispatched to London to help finger suspects in the case.

The first to be arrested were a father and son, Henry Blower the elder and younger. Both were Catholic.

Elizabeth had repudiated her sister’s Catholic faith and restored the Church of England her father established. At the same time, in reaction against Mary’s persecution of non-Catholics, English citizens who wished were allowed to remain Catholic under Elizabeth, though with penalties and under constant watch for signs of disloyalty. Nevertheless in the public mind, Catholicism, conjuring and treason all became associated.

(Dee’s own ordination to the Catholic priesthood, which had taken place during Mary’s reign, was conveniently forgotten by nearly everyone, including Dee himself.)

Under torture, young Blower Jr. accused a protestant clergyman, Thomas Harding, of making the images. He identified Harding as a secret Catholic.

Harding denied everything. He was tortured in his turn, but never cracked.

At the same time, Elizabeth’s health grew worse. Pain clawed at her face like a predatory beast. To a modern mind, the symptoms might suggest facial neuralgia, but Renaissance doctors were stymied. Was it supernatural? Dee met twice with the Queen, apparently performing some kind of magic for her, to no lasting effect.

Finally, the authorities arrested a fourth suspect in the wax-image case, a Catholic alchemist named John Prestall. Prestall had conspired against Elizabeth in the past, but had been spared execution. He had also made personal trouble for Dee. With this arrest another round of tortures followed. 

Past history seemed to have turned upside-down. Instead of Dee’s being held prisoner in the Tower on suspicion of treason, he now sat safely ensconced as the Queen’s trusted adviser, while others — including this personal enemy — suffered Dee’s earlier plight.

The Queen, however, felt no better.

Dee, with 100 pounds travel money, next was dispatched to the Continent to consult with a renowned German diagnostician. He secretly carried with him, for analysis in the specialist’s rudimntary chromatograph, a flask of the Queen’s urine. 

Results of the urinalysis, to his frustration, proved inconclusive.

Meanwhile, with Dee gone on this 1,500-mile round trip, the Court seethed with conspiracy rumors and rage against English Catholics. A fresh round of religious violence — something Elizabeth always wished to avoid — seemed imminent. 

Convicted of treason, Harding and Prestall faced a gruesome death. Prestall received the last rites, but his execution was at the last second postponed. This happened again. And then a third time.

Finally...an upset.

Investigators, all this time, had persisted in their work. Somehow, a certain well-known conjuror, Thomas Elkes, came to be questioned in the wax-doll case. 

Elkes shockingly admitted that he himself was the creator of the  images causing so much fear. He shrugged off any notion of intent to harm the Queen. A love charm, he explained. A young man wished to win a woman from a rival. The would-be lover paid Elkes to cast a spell. The dolls, Elkes said, represented the love triangle.

Elizabeth’s physicians simultaneously shifted their concern to a more obvious cause of facial pain: her rotten teeth.

Dee disembarked from his lengthy voyage only to find that once again, his labors on the Queen’s behalf were suddenly beside the point.

All those accused of treasonous magic were released. As for Elkes, no one seemed bothered enough to prosecute the small-time “cunning man.” 

Elizabeth had lost interest in the whole affair; and Dee’s own standing had become a trifle wobbly. 

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II. Jane

Dee conducts a demonstration for Queen Elizabeth in this imaginary illustration. One of the young lady observers might have been Jane Fromoundes.

March 1582.

The stranger arrived like a bird of ill omen on a sinister wind.

Mrs. John Dee -- Jane — felt a sinking premonition as soon as he crossed the threshold. Further acquaintance worsened her impression.

The crippled leg was nothing against him, of course. But the mutilation, which she deduced, though he tried to hide it by always wearing a cap! What judge had ordered the man’s ears to be sliced off, and for what crime?  

Soft and white as a maggot, arrogant, idle, flattering, sly, every moment angling for advantage, he introduced himself into the household as Edward Talbot. His fantastical talk entranced the Doctor.

Talbot slandered the Doctor’s longtime specialist in scrying, Barnabas Saul. Saul, in angry response, walked off the job. Now Talbot would take Saul’s place, staring into a crystal ball and obtaining answers to whatever questions Dee might put. 

Jane Dee made discreet inquiries among her own connections. She discovered the back story. Confronted, “Talbot” agreed that yes, his real name was Edward Kelley. That placed him: a known charlatan, convicted forger, and, out of his own mouth, a proven liar and imposter. 

Why wouldn’t her husband listen to reason? Why couldn’t he see for himself? Why must Jane tolerate this parasite in her house?

She was only 24; her husband, 55. It was perhaps their first real, shouting fight. 

Four years ago, what had she felt, young Jane Fromounds, as she stood before the altar, marrying a man old enough to be her father — nearly old enough to be her gandfather? 

Jane belonged to a brood of 10 children in a fairly well-off English Catholic family. She was employed at Court as “gentlewoman servant” to one of the Queen’s closest confidantes. The teenaged Jane must have been intelligent, well-spoken, discreet, and reasonably attractive to hold such a job; likely she was quite literate as well. 

Dee, apart from his extraordinary education and network of clients, was the sole, aging scion of a disgraced former customs officer. Though riding high at the moment, he worried about the future. No solid career path existed for learned men in Elizabth’s England, outside of the clergy. Dee’s activities earned only fees for particular projects, inherently unreliable. He was continually petitioning the Queen for a pension, or for some ecclesiastical position, to provide a solid, steady income. 

Dee’s being an ordained Catholic priest proved some impediment to a career in the Church of England. But not to marriage.

He first, at 38, wed the widow of one of his father’s business associates. Katheryn Constable brought to the marriage some land, with a house in the north of England. They had no children. After a decade, Katheryn left him widowed.

Dr. Dee at home.

A couple of years later (which may have encompassed a second marriage quickly ending in death) Dee’s own widowed mother passed away. He inherited her rambling old home at Mortlake. It seems that not long after this event, Dee became engaged to Jane, just turning 20 at the time. 

What could have been the young woman’s reason to accept such a May-November marriage? And for that matter, what led Dee to think of her?

If Dee’s calculations involved money, he was disappointed. Though Queen Elizabeth herself wrote promoting the match, Jane’s father revolted against it. Unable to refuse directly, he cut his daughter off without a shilling. The wedding went ahead — squeezed in, that chilly February, just ahead of Lent, which would have forced a postponement. 

Why, why, why?

Was Court politics — always convoluted and ruthless — behind it? Did someone hold a grudge against Jane, or against her family? Was Jane, in essence, gifted to the useful mage, as a gracious (but cost-free) act of patronage from the Queen?    

Did Jane Fromoundes herself have any say? At 20, did she feel it was time to be married, no matter to whom? Did she have some sort of “father complex”? Was she thrilled by Dee’s profession? Did a horoscope — one of Dee’s specialties — convince her?

What sort of future did she expect?

Did she — like young Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s 1871 novel Middlemarch — hope to share in the intellectual life of her much older bridegroom? If so, Jane was to find, like Dorothea, that her husband entertained no such notion. 

Jane would find herself responsible for the practical management of Dee’s burgeoning establishment at Mortlake, with its continual comings and goings of servants, visitors, scholars, and clients; she would bear eight children, and lose three; she would in time be reduced, by poverty, to begging for aid from her Court connections.

She would accompany her husband on an exodus to Prague, and back again; she would have adultery forced upon her; and she would perish, years before her elderly husband, of the plague.   

During these ordeals, it appears Jane Dee shouldered her responsibilities with energy, concientiousness, and as much wisdom as she was permitted to exercise.

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III. Letters and Light

The angels of Mars and the angels of the Sun, a page of the “Sworn Book of Honorius.” John Dee owned a copy of this grimoire dating to roughly 1400.  blogs.bl.uk/...

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God...In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.

John 1:1

Quoted in a magical grimoire
dating to the early 1580s,
currently residing in the Folger Shakespeare Library,
and recently published as The Book of Oberon

The house where Edward Kelley a.k.a. Talbot installed himself as Dee’s new right-hand man was stuffed with treasures, wonders and curiousities.

Queen Elizabeth declined suggestions to establish a national library, perhaps because the royal Exchequer was scarcely ever solvent. Dee undertook to create, himself, the nucleus of such a library in his home.

Thanks in part to Dee’s own prolific writings, we have a fair idea of what it held. 

Distillation; from a medieval manucript. (DK library.)

Four or five rooms in the sprawling old residence were stuffed chock-a-block with books. These numbered some four or five thousand volumes all told, old and new, printed and manuscript, bound and unbound, in 21 languages both ancient and modern — often in multiple copies. Some of these books came to Dee from printers and dealers; some Dee himself acquired on the Continent; others, in danger of destruction, Dee had salvaged. He crammed these riches onto ranges of shelves in order of size, then according to whether bound or unbound, and only finally, by subject. Dee offered the use of this collection to visiting clients, students, and traveling scholars; some books he also lrnt or traded. 

There were textbooks on standard subjects: grammar, logic and rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. As well, the shelves held ancient and medieval literary works; rare sources sought by specialists; histories; treatises on theology; manuals of magic; books about law, navigation, alchemy, foreign nations, art, 

anger, burial, chastity, cosmetics, dogs, dreams, earthquakes, falconry, gymnastics, heresy, roads, and tides. 

(Sherman, 1995, p. 31) 

Another three large rooms served as laboratories, where Dee made physical and chemical experiments. Here he kept a collection of “rare and exquisitely made instruments mathematical,” such as globes, quadrants, mirrors, lenses, a mechanical clock, and costly laboratory vessels. Yet another room stored maps, antique charters, family histories, and coats of arms, which could be copied for a fee. Dee as well collected “natural wonders” including rare plant extracts and a magnetic lodestone. Whether he kept a stuffed crocodile hung from the ceiling is not recorded. We do know that he had a garden.

We also know about some, at least, of the magical apparatus that Dee and Kelley employed: a “holy table” inscribed with geometric diagrams and letters, magic wax seals, scrying mirrors, and crystal ball. Several of these items survive.

Angels, Dee thought, could be constrained to reveal the hidden truths of nature. And properly invoked, disclose God’s secret plans to the adept.

He had already engaged in “angelic conversations” long before Kelley’s arrival. In fact Kelley’s predecessor had been sent to help Dee five years earlier, by one of the Queen’s most trusted courtiers. This suggests the Court not only knew of these activities but relied upon them. 

The advent of Kelley — more than a mere scryer but an adept himself, and further, an alchemist — may have inspired Dee to   

Before we scoff:

What we today call science and pseudoscience were then undifferentiated. Even the first systematic philosophy of empirical scientific investigation, to be proposed by Francis Bacon, still lay years ahead. 

Scholars and scientists searched for clues to natural phenomena both in actual experience and in books. It made sense, at the time. Books and manuscripts opened to European scholars the past achievements of Greeks and Romans, the medieval age, Jewish scholarship, and and Islamic culture. But for this, European mathematicians and scientists would have had to reinvent. If they sometimes misinterpreted, failed to distinguish the real from the fake, mistook sterile dead ends for promising beginnings, who could blame them? 

The “Phoenix portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I. The phoenix emblem is at the center of her jeweled collar. In myth, the phoenix at the end of its life goes up in flames and is reborn from an egg that appears in the ashes. It has been speculated that the rebirth symbol in the portrait signified imminent hope that Philosopher’s Stone was about to be achieved, in time to restore youth to the aging monarch.

In the laboratory, Renaissance chemists discovered fresh methods of assaying and refining ores. They also pored over manuals of ancient and medieval chemistry, learning techniques. Some enigmatic works claimed to describe, apparently in code, how to create a Philosopher’s Stone, capable of transmuting any metal into gold.

Absent our current understanding of molecular chemistry, was it unreasonable to try and duplicate the procedure?

Renaissance physicians and apothecaries advanced new cures, or supposed cures, against plagues both old and new. They too held out hopes of the Philosopher’s Stone, which — the old books informed them — aas well as making gold, could extend human life indefinitely. Was this less reasonable than the investigations of cryogenics, or the fantasies of “downloading” one’s mental contents into a computer, that exist today? 

Monarchs including Elizabeth encouraged researchers trying to synthesize the Stone — and even funded them.

Synthesizing the Philosopher’s Stone: an emblematic rather than realistic portrayal. (DK library.0

As to predicting the future:

Uncertainty is an annoying fact of life. One that individuals and whole societies have sometimes found impossible to bear.

We need to protect ourselves and those we love. We need to know what is coming. There must be some way. Somebody must know and be able to tell us. So we wish. So much so, that we may suspend our reason. 

Once it was the Delphic oracle, and her kin. Birds flying, cracks latticing burnt scapulas, dreams, the fall of yarrow stalks. Even now some people scrutinize the prophecies of Nostradamus. Some bestow their faith on self-proclaimed Christian prophets. Some on the anonymous “Q.”

A few even pay attention to predictions based on science. ;-)

A horoscope cast by Dee.

By the Renaissance, specialists were highly skilled in predicting the normal  movements of sun, moon, panets and stars. These movements in turn predicted the changing seasons, their weather patterns, cycles of reproductive life, stages of crop development, characteristic illnesses. In the Renaissance mind, why should the heavens not predict still more, if we only knew how to read them?

Further, if we believe God has specific plans for individuals and for the unfolding of history, as religion taught, it would seem at least possible to acquire inside information. Old books, seemingly, taught how.

Dee well knew both astronomy and its astrological application, which were considered aspects of a single science. He used this expertise to predict the outcome of events and to identify the most favorable days for certain actions. He cast horoscopes for Elizabeth. He was qualified to pronounce on the portents of celestial events such as comets, meteor showers and planetry conjunctions.

Another Renaissance method of learning what the future held was to “phone a friend,” who might — depending on the invocation — be an angel, a demon, a deceased person (necromancy), or an unspecified “spirit.” There were textbooks for this just as there were for astronomy/astrology.

Gramma (Greek), letter (of the alphabet); techne, art, craft. 
Grammatike (Greek), the art of writing, philology, literature. 
Grammatica (Latin), grammar, philology. 
Grammaria (conjectural form, Medieval Latin). 
Gramaire (Old French), grammar, learning. 
Grammaire (French), grammar, incantation. 
Grimoire (French and English), a book of spells.

--Etymonline.com

Dee took care to limit his practice to angels, thus avoiding legal sanctions for commerce with demonic powers or for necromancy. He specialized in using mirrors and crystals.

The Sign of Aemeth, one of the designs used by Dee to conduct invocations. Wikipedia.

When Dee and Kelley sat down to contact an angel, Dee would use a summoning incantation. These invocations were lengthy, precise, and used specifically Christian language, including the name of God.

By this means Dee was able to invite, even force, an invisible angel to enter a crystal or mirror. Catalogs of such angels and spirits existed, specifying their departments of expertise and action. 

Dee’s wax seal inscribed with the Sign of Aemeth. Wikipedia.

Dee’s power over the angel was maintained somehow by the presence of a wax disc carved with a specific patttern of geometric forms, letters and images specific to the one summmoned.

There was a complicated protocol, involving washings and scentings and more verbal formulas, for creating these discs, which could incorporate Hebrew, Greek and Latin as well as numbers and geometric patterns. Dee and Kelley developed an artificial alphabet they called “Enochian” — supposedly reflecting the original language of humankind.

Once the angel was enclosed in the mirror or crystal, Dee could then ask his questions. 

Dee’s black obsidian mirror, now in the British Museum. www.bl.uk/...

Dee faced a serious handicap, however, in that not just anyone could see an angel. Dee himself could not. Only once, Dee wrote in his diary that he thought he had himself seen an angel in a crystal. Dee had to work with a “scryer” who possessed this special gift.

One of Dee’s crystals. www.rcplondon.ac.uk/...

The scryer  — there had been several before Edward Kelley — would observe and report on the actions of the angel in response to Dee’s questions. Sometimes answers were aparently provided by pointing to certain letters or numbers on the wax seal or “holy table,” thus forming names in “Enochian” — not unlike like a modern Ouija board, except that the angel’s motions were invisible.

A recreation of Dee’s “holy table” setup, with an inscribed wax disc placed at the center and a crystal ball resting on the disc. Wikipedia. 

Dee wrote down the responses in an encyclopedic record, much of which has survived till today. 

Obviously the position of scryer was one of great trust. An unscrupulous person might manipulate the situation, invent responses, or even deliberately lead the questioner astray.

Dee never seems to have doubted Edward Talbot/Kelley any more than he doubted his basic techniques.

Those techniques were based on existing practices among magical workers, growing in part out of Christian tradition.

As a child John learnt to pray from a Book of Hours or Primer….Some Primer prayers...like spells and charms, presumed that repeated incantations of God’s magical names and repeated signs of the cross would conjure angelic assistance….                                                                                                                                 (Parry, p. 2)

As an undergraduate Dee befriended John Hatcher, a fellow of St. John’s, who practiced angel magic….                       

Dr. John Caius, who returned to Cambridge while Dee studied there, owned a manuscript in which ‘Bacon’s experimental art’ included using a young boy as a ‘skryer’ of visions in reflective surfaces. It alo taught magicians how to command angels into crystals to reveal the secrets of God’s ‘marvellous works’, and how to conjure a spirit guarding buried treasure.   (pp. 10 f.)   

From Roger Bacon’s treatise on optics. Wikipedia.

This “Bacon” was not Francis but the extraordinary 13th-century polymath and groundbreaking scientist Roger Bacon. By Dee’s time, in addition to Roger Bacon’s genuine works many others were circulating, falsely attributed to him, which, taken along with some of Roger Bacon’s own figurative expressions, led scholars to believe that angels had led the the scientist to his pioneering insights. This in turn spurred 16th-century investigators like Dee to attempt such conversations. 

Some of Bacon’s most impressive work concerned optics. For Dee, the study of optics, like chemistry and astronomy, united the practical and the mystical.

During a course of study Louvin in what is now Belgium, Dee had mastered the latest advances in mathematics, navigation and cartography. 

...Louvin had also exposed Dee to the empirical application of optics in the Low Countries’ tradition of naturalistic painting….(which) originated with Van Eyck around 1420-30. Artits used lenses and mirrors to project external scenes onto walls and canvases in darkened rooms, a miraculous effect that Bacon had described two centuries earlier. Using this projection technique, artists...harnessed the creative power to paint, apparently by ‘magic,’ realstic landscapes and portraits. Optical effects delighted Dee...He owned Albrecht Durer’s writings on the subject…     

 (Parry, p. 44)

and while still a Cambridge undergraduate, Dee had assisted at college theatricals by creating a special optical effect that simulated a scarab beetle in flight. 

The bivalent conception of light, as both physical and mystical, had roots beyond specifically Christian culture.  For example:

Dee found ancient support for astrology in the Arabic philosopher al-Kindi’s treatise On Rays, which taught that occult rays constantly pouring out of stellar bodies determined events and human actions.             (Parry, p. 44)

Al-Kindi’s On Rays claimed that magic could redirect the effects of celestial rays. Fully a third of On Rays applied ray theory to the ‘power of words’ in magical prayer, figures, diagrams, talismans and symbols...(C)ontemplation of a hieroglyph could produce magical effects.                                  (p. 54)

al-Kindi had himself preceded and influenced Roger Bacon.

Another related tradition was the Jewish Kabbalah, to describe which would require a book in itself, but very roughly, this tradition subjected scripture to close analysis and and interpretation in terms of the mystical significance of numbers and letters. Renaissance Christian thinkers became fascinated by Kabbalah and developed Christianized versions. 

Dee’s (and others’) attempts to communicate with angels thus made perfect sense within a framework of mainstream Renaissance thought.

The advent of Kelley — not a mere scryer but an adept himself, who as well claimed special insight into the enigma of Philosopher’s Stone -- seems to have coincided with Dee’s finding himself financially straitened and psychologically stressed.

With Kelley, Dee spent much time questioning the angels on alchemy, pleading with God to direct him to buried treasure, and attempting to discern God’s intentions both for England but for himself personally. The questions and answers began to take on an Apocalyptic tone.

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IV. The Catalyst

London, perhaps much as the dubious Count Laski would have seen it when arriving by ship in 1583, though this engraving dates to 30 years earlier. fineartamerica.com/...

He arrived by ship in London: a noble visitor from Poland. The Court, the City, the University of Oxford all embraced him. 

Outsize in body and personality, splendid in self-presentation, luxurious in his habits— with a vast red beard he caressed like a pet fox — Count Olbracht Laski exerted a fascination on everyone he met. His arrival seemed to portend outsize developments: A new alliance? A reset of affairs in central Europe? Even the advent of a Last World Emperor — and peace on earth?

Dee — who had previously floated an idea that the Last World Emperor of popular imagination might turn out to be Elizabeth herself — was tasked by the Court with discerning God’s plan regarding Laski. The Count would have visited Mortlake himself, but Dee was forced to beg off entertaining him; Dee now had not the means in his household even to provide decent comfort for a couple of courtly visitors.

Laski’s supporters shortly were dashed to discover their own massive failure of intelligence: the nobleman in fact had fallen badly out of favor in his own country. He was possessed of neither an official mission, nor political power, nor even enough money to pay his way back home. 

Dee, however, with the help of Kelley, was not so disillusioned. In fact, the angels he consulted seemed to indicate that Laski might just be an answer to Dee’s own prayers.

Read Part 2 here. 

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Many thanks to Angmar !!!! for hosting this series and for uploading most of the graphics for this article.

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Odds and Ends 

A ton of info about grimoires in Wikipedia. Interesting: a very old Book of Enoch, Hebrew or Aramaic originally, contained information about both astrology and angels. Sir Walter Raleigh knew of this book by about 1600; did Dee?

The Key of Solomon was one well-know grimoire, probably Italian, dating to the 1200s or 1300s. It emphasized safeguarding onself by maintaining a holy purpose. Chapter 13 contained instructions on how to interrogate “intelligences” using a white carpet, a piece of blue parchment, incense, and a dove feather. Angels were invoked in this process.

Another grimoire probably dating to the 1200s, of which Dee owned a copy, was the "Sworn Book" of Honorius (students had to swear to keep this teaching secret). Starts with a great deal of religious language; extensive catalogues of angels but also catalogs demons or “spirits” who could be invoked. Some of it was written in a crude sort of code.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was of a generation prior to Dee. Text of his three books on magic, more encyclopedic than specifically instructional.

More on Dee’s and Kelley’s "Enochian" language and ”Enochian” magic. (Are your eyes crossing yet?)

In Dee's own words, his voluminous proceedings with angels.

An outlier theory that Dee and Kelley may have employed Cannabis in obtaining visions. Use of the plant is attested in some grimoires. 

A Folger Shakespeare Library ms., apparently completed in about 1543 and recently published under the title, “The Book of Oberon,” prescribed the use of a mirror that after suitable incantations calling upon “the power of the Holy Ghost” to descend into the mirror, is treated with olive oil, holy water, wine, bread crumbs and fire and “gladly spirits shall apear and answer to all things openly” (pp.102 ff.).

Cambridge University Library MS Additional 3544, attributed to a London cunning man named Paul Foreman and dated to about 1560, contains directions for employing as a scryer “a child that is within nine years of age and of true wedlock.” After invocations, and after fastening six mysterious written names to the child’s thumb with red thread, the thumbnail was to be anointed with “oil of olive or meat oil.” The child is then directed to focus on the nail as questions are asked and — with the aid of more incantations as needed —  should eventually be able to see images and come forth with answers (pp. 27 ff.). 

The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a skeptical expose first published in 1584, preserved another, somewhat incoherent, recipe “to enclose a spirit in a cristall stone.” But in contrast to Dee’s proceeding, it instructs the adept to conjure “infernal” kings, princes, and ministers to appear within an inscribed circle, “and thou shalt see the crystal made blacke.” After the the devils are dismissed and the crystal clears, “take up thy christall, and looke therein, asking what thout wilt, and it will shew it unto thee” (pp. 238 f.).

Hat tip for the title of my section III to the former Office of Letters and Light, now titled National Novel Writing Month. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I have presented a lightly fictionalized account of a true story, so far as I have been able to discern it. I have not knowingly changed any facts.

Primary sources are voluminous and many of them scattered; no definitive secondary source apparently exists that does justice to all the aspects of Dee; I’ve barely scratched the surface of what is known; and scholars’ interpretations of events have differed greatly.

The books listed below I consulted in addition to the Wikipedia articles and other materials linked within the text. Note: regarding Dee and his associates, Wikipedia in particular contains a relatively large number of claims that seem doubtful or have been disputed.

I apologize for any errors in what turned out to be an awkward project on a tablet lacking features like copy-paste!  

Foreman, Paul (attrib.) The Cambridge Book of Magic: a Tudor necromancer’s manual. Transl. by Francis Young. Texts In Early Modern Magic, Cambridge, UK, 2015.

Harms, Daniel, James R. Clark, and Joseph H. Peterson. The Book of Oberon: A Sourcebook of Elizabethan Magic. Llewellyn Pblications, Wodbury, Minn., 2019. 

Parry, Glyn. The Arch-Conjuror of England, John Dee. Yale University Press, 2011.

Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Originally published by Richard Cotes, London, 1584;  several new chapters (at odds with the author’s original intent) added in a third edition, 1665; third edition republished with an introduction by Montague Summers, John Rodker, England, 1930; Rodker edition reprinted by Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1972. 

Sherman, William H. John Dee. The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. 

Yates, Frances A. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Originally published by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London and Boston,1972; reprinted by Shambhala Publications, Boulder, Colo., 1978.

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